The significance of Halley’s Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry

A comet appears in the Bayeux Tapestry between the scene showing the death of the English king Edward ‘the Confessor’ and the ‘election’ of his successor, Harold ‘Godwinson’ (Figure 1). The Tapestry’s inscription only refers to this as a “star”, though we can see from its depiction – shown with a ‘hairy tail’ – that it is a comet, now known to us as Halley’s Comet (P1/Halley), after the English astronomer Edmond Halley who in 1682 established its average 76-year cycle of appearance in the Earth’s skies.

Halley reported on his discovery to Isaac Newton, aware that, due to a myriad of internal and external processes, including the chaotic nature of its orbit,1 its cycle, though regular, was not precise. Eighteen years after the publication of Newton’s (1687) Principia, Halley also realised that this comet could be seen multiple times throughout history and that it coincided with important happenings.3 As we will show, he was not the first to observe this.

The depiction of Halley’s Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry is a reminder of the importance of celestial events for people living around the year 1000. Also discussed below are two more comets (C/905 K1 and X/975 P1) identified with disasters that struck the English around the same time as the 1066 comet, and a further two (C/1097 T1 and X/1097 X1) that signify bad omens; the only positively perceived object associated with a comet (in 995) does not appear in modern records.

In historical accounts of many cultures, comets are generally considered portents of change rather than disaster.4 Here we consider the significance of the Tapestry’s comet in the context of the (so-called) English ‘succession crisis’ of 1066 with reference to (these) other contemporary accounts of comets. We conclude that although the tapestry’s illustration is = suggestive and unmistakably Halley’s Comet, it is not a priority for its creators to give a precise account of its arrival in the sky, but rather connect it – likely for political reasons, albeit retrospectively – to the sequential events of Edward’s death and Harold’s coronation. In that, the tapestry’s anonymous ‘artists’ provide a unique telling of its arrival.